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Unstoppable (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) is about as rote as inspirational-sports movie titles get. You know – even if you’re not , you have to BELIEEVVVE you’re . But that’s the title of its subject Anthony Robles’ autobiography, so they went with it. Robles is a real-life wrestler who was the 2010-11 NCAA champion for Arizona State University, an achievement all the more remarkable since he was born with one leg. Now he’s played by Moonlight star and When They See Us Emmy winner Jharrel Jerome, his mother is Jennifer Lopez, and his coaches are Don Cheadle and Michael Pena, in a movie that works really hard to earn your affection and struggles to stand out in it’s genre, but nevertheless has me avoiding ending this sentence with a wrestling cliche having to do with winning.
UNSTOPPABLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: The weights, the medals, the shelf full of shoes, the Rocky poster on the wall: This is clearly Anthony’s (Jerome) room, in a garage, which is at least in but-it’s-a-dry-heat Mesa, Arizona. He has to sleep there, since he’s the oldest of four in a crowded home occupied by a hardscrabble working-class family living in a neighborhood that sees its share of yellow police crime-scene tape. We meet his mom Judy (Lopez) as she sits in the stands, shouting down insensitive wrestling-watchers who say things like “He’s only got one leg?” and “Is this some kind of charity thing?” and “I could beat him!” And then Anthony does this move and that move – the movie isn’t big on the wrestling details – and pins his opponent. Coach Bobby Williams (Pena) cheers. Judy beams. And Anthony goes home the state champ. It’s 2007.
His cadre of half-siblings greet him with cheers, but his asshat stepdad, Rick (Bobby Cannavale)? He pretends to be slightly less than half-proud but is the type who constantly needs to assert who’s the man of the house, and boasts about how he has authori-tahhh over the inmates he guards for a living. Rick likes to rough up Judy and remind his stepkid Anthony that he’s not his real father, and shit like that – the guy’s just begging to be arm-barred or choke-held until his carotid closes up enough to make his eyes roll back in his head. And Rick has opinions about how stupid Anthony would be to not take the full ride scholarship to Drexel (LMGTFY: a small private university in Philadelphia) instead of holding out hope as a walk-on at ASU, where he could compete with the big guys. Now, here’s something to yell at the screen: Whatever Rick the prick says you should do, do the opposite!
Rick comes and goes from their lives, and therefore this movie, which means Anthony needs to pick up more work cleaning rich people’s private jets and Judy needs to pick up more shifts at Target. But Anthony’s focus never wavers. He gambles on ASU, where coach Shawn Charles (Cheadle) cuts and dries it for him: Anthony’s got an uphill climb. Literally, because Charles makes his guys climb an expert-level grade up a mountain, a series of rocky steps that are much more difficult than the Rocky steps Anthony climbed when he was in Philly. But Anthony does it, on crutches. Respect and admiration are his. Now all he has to do is start winning.
Easier said than done, of course. But we know Anthony isn’t kaput because the movie hasn’t given us any montages, rousing speeches or slo-mo sweaty-mat action yet. (But what about hyperventilating play-by-play broadcasters? you’re surely asking. Patience. You get those too.) And he still has many ups and downs to work through – Rick encounters, Judy’s tangles with mortgage jerks, challenges to ASU’s wrestling program, etc. Actually, that’s a lot of downs before the ups happen, one of them possibly having to do with the dominant wrestler at Iowa, the school that didn’t want anything to do with Anthony. Will Anthony put that guy in the thing where you hold a guy’s wrist and twist it and then flip him over and lay on top of him til the ref says IT’S ALLLL OVER? No spoilers, mate.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Unstoppable is on par with stuff like The Beautiful Game, Rez Ball or Chang Can Dunk – good, well-meaning sports films that don’t break the mold but are worth visiting. It’s nowhere near as good as Vision Quest, though, which still retains the #1 spot when it comes to singlet cinema.
Performance Worth Watching: Jerome’s deep sincerity in the lead role shouldn’t be overlooked. Without it, and Lopez’s similarly grounding turn in a slightly thankless mama-bear role, the movie might not stand out among the underdog-sports-movie pack at all.
Memorable Dialogue: An inspirational Coach Charles bit that rings a little differently for a guy with one leg: “When something is out of balance, it’s out of harmony with itself.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: It’s hard to get too wound up about Unstoppable, but it’s hard to deny the rah-rah but-it’s-based-on-a-true-storyness of it. The real Anthony Robles is absolutely an inspiration, and the movie about him is serviceable enough to do him reasonable justice thanks to Jerome’s rock-solid performance and the steady hand of director William Goldenberg (a first-timer who previously won an Oscar for film editing). Nothing about the movie will surprise you. At least it doesn’t feature a ragtag group of misfits or a sweep-the-leg-Johnny plot, right? Well, it half-asses those two things, so they don’t count, kinda accidentally for the better, because the movie is relentlessly watchable.
And so it works through a number of cliched, but professionally executed scenes: Grit-yer-teeth training montages, confrontations with Rick, palling around with his plane-washing pal, coaches delivering wise bons mot, sentimental-tearjerk moments involving Anthony’s fan letters, multiple trips to Reaction Shot City, the inevitable infuriating scene where Judy gets on the phone and tries to talk to someone at the mortgage company and ends up a hair’s breadth from homicidal (poor woman. What’s next? Calling Comcast for jacking up the rates for no reason?). There are moments when the narrative feels jagged and unkempt as it struggles to maintain a sense of rising tension, which tells me Goldenberg struggled to balance the rhythms of real life with the pacing and narrative momentum a movie needs. As it stands, the movie weighs in a little heavy at 116 minutes when it could stand to be a tight 100.
Again, the film doesn’t get into the what-have-yous of competitive wrestling, which is disappointing. I didn’t want Moby Dick to cut away for lengthy educational passages about the art of whaling, so to speak, but the movie needed to find a way to deliver a little more context and detail to help unfamiliars understand what was happening when Anthony hits the mat (Goldenberg ends up relying too heavily on the shouting broadcasters to carry that load). There’s also not much complexity to Anthony outside the sport – does he like girls or have any hobbies or ever pick up a book? It takes two-thirds of the movie for us to learn why he loves wrestling so much, but eventually, it wisely leans into a crucial idea about the difference between competing while angry and competing while inspired. That’s a lesson Anthony learns here, and one that’s not only worth taking with us, but it saves the movie from being genre pablum.
Our Call: Unstoppable is a solid, solid, solid movie. Not exciting or exceptional, but solid. So STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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